Selective prosecution of political dissenters on an over-broad statute that everyone violates makes a mockery of the People's Revolution. This is the "rule of law" as cynical windowdressing for capricious tyranny.

Barry Haskell Levine

With Snap of Group Photo, 3 Members of Advocacy Group Face Trial in China

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Published: October 26, 2013

Enlarge This ImageHONG KONG — Three grass-roots rights advocates face trial in eastern China on Monday, with the main charge against them stemming from a group photograph snapped in the courtyard of an apartment block. That brief gathering will be at the heart of the first courtroom test of how far the government will go to extinguish the New Citizens Movement, which has pressed the Communist Party leadership under Xi Jinping to embrace democratic change.

China Daily, via Reuters

The three residents of Xinyu City in Jiangxi Province — Liu Ping, Wei Zhongping, and Li Sihua — face charges of illegal assembly for gathering below Ms. Liu’s second-floor home in April with other friends to take a photograph to make a political point, said Ms. Liu’s daughter, Liao Minyue, and lawyer, Zhang Xuezhong. The group displayed signs urging the release of detained protesters and the disclosure of officials’ wealth, and released the picture on the Internet. The police detained the three about a week after the photograph was taken.

“If that counts as an illegal assembly, then it would also be an illegal assembly for school students to gather for a graduating photo,” said Mr. Zhang, the defense lawyer, in a telephone interview from Shanghai.

The previously little-known trio has attracted widespread attention as the first detainees associated with the New Citizens Movement to face trial since the government started to round up supporters in March. The movement is a loose network of legal advocates, human rights campaigners and disgruntled citizens that began to coalesce into a more coordinated effort last year. It has demanded greater political rights, equal educational rights for all, and the disclosure of officials’ assets at a time when the comfortable lives of some officials have become a source of intense public resentment.

“I’m personally convinced that, in fact, this is part of a coordinated nationwide campaign to attack and break up the New Citizens Movement,” Mr. Zhang said of the trial.

“They hope to use this Jiangxi case as an opening,” said Mr. Zhang, a law lecturer who was suspended from teaching after he publicly called for democratic constitutional reforms. “They want to test the public reaction, and also test how, internally, the legal system responds.”

The Chinese police have detained, and in some cases formally arrested, 18 participants in and supporters of the New Citizens Movement, according to Human Rights Watch. The most prominent are Xu Zhiyong, a legal advocate who was detained by the police in Beijing in July, and Wang Gongquan, a wealthy investor detained in Beijing in September. Both men are being held on charges of assembling a crowd to disrupt public order, and both have been formally arrested, making it likely they will be indicted. The police have not specified the basis of those charges

“Liu Ping, Wei Zhongping, Li Sihua — they were supporters and participants in the New Citizens Movement, and played a major role in attracting attention in their area,” said Mr. Zhang, the lawyer. When police interrogated them, he said, many of the questions were about Mr. Xu and the movement.

As well as the illegal gathering accusation, Ms. Liu and Mr. Wei face two other charges: “assembling a crowd to disturb the public order” and “using a cult organization to undermine the law,” said their lawyers.

The public order allegation is based on the two handing out leaflets for independent candidates for a local People’s Congress election in 2011, and the cult allegation is based on comments that the two sent on an online messaging service in 2012, calling on friends to pay attention to the trial of a follower of Falun Gong, a banned spiritual group. Lawyers for all three defendants said they intended to plead not guilty to all the charges.

The trial suggests how worried the Chinese Communist Party leadership is about potential challenges to its hold on power, even from citizens who have seized on the leadership’s own promises of less corruption, greater candor and greater respect for the law, said several rights lawyers and advocates. What particularly worries the government, they said, is how some disgruntled ordinary citizens, like Ms. Liu, have increasingly turned personal grievances into political demands.

A 48-year-old former steel mill worker who was laid off, Ms. Liu embodies that transformation. Her activism started about eight years ago when she began petitioning the government for redress after the police beat her uncle, according to her daughter, Ms. Liao. Over years of complaining, however, Ms. Liu became drawn to broader demands. She unsuccessfully tried to stand as an independent candidate in elections for a local party-controlled assembly in 2011, and last year joined the emerging New Citizens Movement.

Her fellow defendants, Mr. Wei and Mr. Li, also started off as petitioners with specific grievances and became drawn into political activism, said their relatives.

“The New Citizen Movement went beyond individual cases to focus on broader demands about civil and political rights,” said Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. “It’s O.K. for citizens to report injustices, but when you start organizing and issuing petitions, that becomes sensitive.”

Chinese courts come under Communist Party control, and there is little likelihood of the trio’s escaping conviction and prison sentences, especially given the political environment.

Since Mr. Xi became Communist Party leader in November, he has demanded that officials strengthen and defend the ideological sinews of party rule, and he also endorsed a directive identifying human rights activists and advocates of civil society as threats to the party. This month, a commentary in a party journal, Red Flag Manuscripts, amplified that warning, and accused hostile Western governments of fomenting subversion inside China by sponsoring dissidents.

The charge of illegal gathering against the trio of activists could bring a prison sentence of up to five years. The other charges could also each bring several years in prison.

But Mr. Zhang, the lawyer for Ms. Liu, saw some hope that the Yushui District People’s Court in Xinyu might reject the charge of illegal assembly. There were no police officers present at the photo shoot, so there was no order to disperse, one of the elements used to define the crime, said Mr. Zhang. The court’s delays in setting a trial date, and the shifting accusations against the defendants, suggested that some officials might be uneasy about prosecuting on the assembly charge, he said.